Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part 126
The man overlooking the body raised his lantern, then he raised his knife over his head and waved to the nearest man nearby. He began to call out, it sounded like a name, or the start of one. Was he calling the name of the man that Jacqueline had killed? Was he calling out for the man nearby, someone he knew, a friend maybe? Felecia would never have an answer to those questions but she still woke thinking about them years later.
The blow came from behind, Jacqueline likely killed that man the same way she had the man he was busy trying to tell his friend about. One moment the villager was standing, the next his body made a soft thudding sound against the gravel path and another fresh wave of steam rose over the nearby vegetation, noting that his blood was busy flowing out and cooling in the night air.
The man nearby didn’t take notice of the strike, or the man falling down next to the body. He was busy shining his own torch around him as he began making a panicked, hitching sound. He nearly stepped on the body of the man Felecia had already killed. His eyes were wide with disgust and fright. So much blood, so much steam still rising off cooling bodies and blood. Felecia raised her aim just a bit and fired her arrow into the man’s face. Better to kill him instantly if she could, the arrow struck the man but something wasn’t right.
The torch fell harmlessly to the moist earth just ahead of the animal corral as the man turned away from Felecia. He didn’t choke or fall or slump and slowly become one with the earth. The man dropped everything and spun around and drove his hands up to his face and began howling like a wounded animal. He wasn’t calling out any names or calling out the location of potential enemies. He kept slapping at the sides of his head and trying to tug at something that seemed to cause him sudden and magnificent distress.
Felecia was already drawing another arrow. She should have stuck to shooting that one in the neck as well but it wasn’t too late, she could get him through the back of the neck near the spine and at least put the man on the ground and quiet him if not kill him instantly.
Jacqueline interrupted Felecia’s follow up shot. She sprung up above the thorny bushes near the gravel walk way and ran behind and across the man who was still busy screaming and fixing his hands around the shaft of the arrow sticking out of the side of his face. The blow with the corn knife was just as quick and deadly as before but Jacqueline was backlight by the moon and the man’s fallen lantern light.
A voice sounded from out in the meadow, at first Felecia wasn’t sure if it was Ganly or one of the others. “The old man! He killed Henly!” The man who shouted stopped stooping in the meadow thickets and the moon did a good job of showing his silhouette against the darker tree line in the distance. Felecia hoped it was the fiend as she leaned out of the front door of the ruin long enough to fire as the figure lifted his arms and waved to be seen. The arrow caught the man under the arm and sunk in enough to make short work of him. He gasped and then groaned pitifully as he fell into the thorny and poisonous plants.
A voice sounded fresh alarm once Felecia ducked back into the ruin and that time it was unmistakably Ganly. “He’s not alone. There’s a bowman in the house.”
Another man, some poor simpleton left of the main group and therefor closer to the edge of the meadow shouted back, “There’s another out here too, at the edge of the swamps.”
A man at the far right behind the house and the animal corral followed, “I hear footsteps in the bushes out here too. We’re surrounded!”
A sudden cacophony rose among the village posse, men shouting about hearing and seeing enemies and hearing ghostly footfalls in the among the meadow plants. Men stumbling upon and seeing their murdered comrades. Exclamations of outrage and despair. For a moment or two it sounded like Jacqueline was right.
Show these villagers some blood, some real blood, and they’ll scatter.
Ganly shouted above the rest of them, showing and announcing himself still near the tree line far to the south of the old ruin. “Shut it you idgets! There’s two of them there, by the old house! Flush them out and we’ll get them!”